


everyone around you starts to run (you lost the race before you begun)

by chemicalpixie



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, F/M, lots of numbers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-12
Updated: 2018-06-12
Packaged: 2019-05-06 06:29:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,740
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14636004
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chemicalpixie/pseuds/chemicalpixie
Summary: “she does not need luck. she lives in the safety of numbers, of fives. she will walk out of the reaping without being reaped.”or; finch's life is nothing more than a series of numbers.





	everyone around you starts to run (you lost the race before you begun)

**Author's Note:**

> sup guess who still hasn't edited the hayffie fic but did write a foxface fic instead? me. it's me. you don't have to guess. anyways thresh/foxface is sweet and also foxface is bi thank you for your time (foxface/electra would be real cute, if electra wasn't dead as hell). also the effects of nightlock are based on those of deadly nightshade, since nightlock comes from hemlock and nightshade and the berries look more like nightshade. so. anyways please kudos and comment if you enjoy, i thrive on validation and praise.
> 
> the title comes from “on your mark (hit it)” by matt miller and was such a perfect foxface quote i couldn't not write a fic about her once i heard it.

**five.**

the first thought finch has on the morning of the reaping is that her name is in the reaping ball five times. four times were mandatory, the fifth was for tesserae she’d taken the year she was twelve and winter was particularly bad and her baby brother starved to death right before her eyes (the only reason finch hadn’t starved was her friend electra, who’d brought her extra bread for lunch all winter. electra’s father had been later found to be involved with an elaborate plan to sabotage the fifteen power plants in the district as an act of rebellion, and his entire family had been killed on the spot. finch tries not to think about that part). they hadn’t needed tesserae after she was twelve, not with only her and her father (her mother had died five minutes after her brother was born). five is her lucky number, she thinks. five will save her. (finch has always loved the order of numbers, and counting, and five is a perfect number. it’s the number of her district, the address of her home, her birthday, the number of letters in her name, and her rank in class. there’s something comfortable in fives, something familiar. something a little like home).

she laid her clothing out for the reaping the night before, and she slips into it easily. she’s wearing a blue dress with a white collar, and the five white buttons on the front are all buttoned just so, and she wears white shoes, and she does not worry. five is her lucky number. five will keep her safe. she ties up her hair in a criss-cross half-updo, and her father walks her to the reaping area. he kisses her on the head for luck, and finch smiles to herself. she does not need luck. she lives in the safety of numbers, of fives. she will walk out of the reaping without being reaped.

finch is reaped. as she stands on the platform next to their escort who is a woman with red-and-green hair the color of electrical wires, she thinks back to the fact that she thought she would walk out of the reaping without being reaped. it turns out only one of those things is true. 

**four.**

four is the number of minutes finch spends with her father before they decide that the time to visit tributes has ended. four is the number of words she screams to her father as they drag him out, “daddy, i love you!” but she doesn’t know if he heard, if he knows, because he’s been too distant the past few years, always working, always busy, and she misses their house _before_ , when everything was warm and the love was almost palpable. she sniffles but does not cry. no one else comes to visit her, not even tessa. who was only sort-of her friend because they lived in the same apartment complex, but she digresses. she runs her tongue over her teeth, and thinks about her district partner. his name is samson, he is fifteen, like her. his name has six letters, unlike hers. hmm. she likes people with five letters in their name. tessa. her brother. he did not have five letters in his full name (gregory), but there were five letters in his nickname (goose) and she’d always liked that better, anyway. she’s called her parents by momma and daddy, both of which are names with five letters since she was old enough to speak (not that she’s ever spoken much, really). she thinks, and she waits. she drums her fingers on the table, and waits. 

**three.**

she spends three hours in the prep room before the parade. they wax her in places she hadn’t thought _had_ hair, trim her hair, and fuss with her eyebrows. they paint her nails, clean and polish her and in the end she feels more like a doll than a person. they put her in an itchy silver costume and she goes out to wait, where she finds her escort. 

her escort bitches about their stylists, who thinks that her costume is ugly and her stylist should be shot, but finch does not say anything in response to this. what would she even say? and when the chariot parades across the stadium, the capital does not cheer for her. she can see, amidst the crowd, the woman who smiled at her, and finch shivers. she knows these cheers are not for her. they are for the careers, for their assumed winner. they do not think she can win. that's alright. she is the only person who believes in herself, but that is okay. she has always been the only person who believes in herself. it does not matter if anyone believes in her. she can win without their approval. 

**two.**

she only speaks twice in the interview. 

when he asks her who is waiting at home for her, she replies “my father.” and caesar smiles with a smile like glittering gold, but finch knows the only thing under that smile is lies. 

when he asks her about her strategy, with a condescending tone that implies that he thinks she has no strategy, she’s insulted enough to tell him that if she applies herself to the situation present, then she can figure it out. she's smarter than anyone here, and he should see that. but he doesn't, because all the capital values is whether or not you're pretty. finch isn't pretty, but she's not exactly bad looking, but she's still smarter than everyone in this room. it's not arrogance. on anyone else it would be, but finch knows for sure she is, so. not arrogance. just facts. finch likes facts. 

caesar tries to get her to speak more, but she’s never been a talkative girl, and all these lights are blinding and she is so made-up her face feels stiff. besides, she knows there isn’t much she can say to catch their attention. after all, no one watches the games for district five. near the end, she can tell caesar is getting a bit frustrated with her, and a little part of her stiffens with pride. she's shown them. she won't play their games.

**one.**

the cannon signaling the start of the game goes off only once, and finch runs. she takes a smaller backpack on the edge of the arena, and she runs. she runs into the girl from twelve, and panics, afraid she will kill her and all her training will have been for naught, but she looks at the girl on fire again and sees she’s just as afraid, so she gathers her bag and runs. she does not stop running until she reaches the forcefield at the edge of the arena.

**two.**

she only steals from the careers twice. she watches them for three days, relying on thresh’s traps for food. they’d allied early in the game, when they realized that both of them were better than the careers were giving them credit for. she steals a block of cheese the first time (she’s just testing the limits, really, to see what she can get away with), and when she comes back to thresh on the edge of the treeline and he takes his half of the cheese and looks at her with a kind of pride in his eyes. they spend their days checking traps and looking for rue, because, as he’s told finch, “it’s unfair that i’m in these games. even more unfair that she is.” they don’t find her, though, but she never shows up as a hologram, so they just have to hope she’s okay. the second time, she takes apples, but before she and thresh are even done eating, there’s a deafening boom that resonates throughout the arena, and the two of them make eye contact and _run_.

it’s not until later that they realize that that damned girl on fire has blown up the career’s food supply, and thresh and finch's food supply with it.

**three.**

she’s only said goodbye to three people in her life. one was her mother, one was her brother, and now thresh is the third. (she never got the chance to say goodbye to electra; she didn’t want to say goodbye to her father in case she managed to come back home alive). she likes him, she thinks, more than she should like anyone in this game. she scoffs to herself. game. it’s not a game; it never has been. 

she doesn’t look him in the eyes as she says it. “goodbye,” she says, and he blinks. 

“what?” he says, in confusion. thresh is not stupid, she knows this — if he was, he’d have died in the bloodbath. as it is, he’s strategizing ways to maximize his advantage over cato, because he thinks that it will come down to the two of them. he’s not stupid, but he’s naive. he thinks the two of them can somehow make it to the end, can somehow be the final two, and that there’s no way that the two of them being the final two won’t end in heartbreak. she’s half in love with him as it is, without thinking of the battles they’d have to make it through together to be the final two. she can almost see it, in her mind’s eye. her, quick and lean and jabbing with her knife, causing more damage with it than even its maker would have thought it could reap. him, with his crescent sword and his strength. she imagines they make a good team. she imagines wrapping his wounds after the fight, the soft bandages against her rough fingers. that’s when they kiss the first time, and he tastes like sweat and desperation but she thinks she wouldn’t have it any other way. they fight cato, and she loses her knife and claws at him with only her nails, leaving deep scrapes across his face until thresh comes up from behind him and strangles him. she thinks if they made it to the final two, he would let her win (thresh is too noble to kill her, though she thinks she wouldn’t mind if it was him — he’d make it quick, and she thinks the act of killing someone is something intimate, something he could never share with anyone else. and she feels a bit of pride for the her in that reality, the one who managed to claw her way into his heart and never let go), and she would be the winner and sob over his corpse until they came to take it away and then leave scratches in his corpse as she tried to keep it with her. they would give her claws like a fox after she wins, and she will cut her palm open as she tries to hold her tongue when they talk about him in her interview. finch is too smart for that. she doesn’t want it to end like that. 

she wants to tell him this. she doesn’t. “we’re getting to the end,” she says. “i don’t want it to be just you and me.”

thresh nods. naive and hopeful he can be, ignorant he is not. he trusts her judgement. “i guess this is goodbye then,” he says, cordially, and it feels almost as though they hadn’t spent the past few days as what finch would call friends. she’d call them maybe something more if it wasn’t for this damned arena. 

“goodbye it is,” finch says, smiling a tight-lipped smile she doesn’t mean, and hoists her backpack over her shoulder and walking away. of the three goodbyes in her life, this is the only one she can reverse. she wants to turn and look back at him, say it was a mistake and they should be allies one more day. she does not turn around. 

**four.**

she spends four hours in the cornucopia, waiting for the feast to start. she thinks thresh is on the edge of the woods, waiting to run in and grab his backpack, and she hopes that he would run in to save her if it came down to that. she could look out, she thinks, see if he is there. she doesn’t, though, and focuses on the hunger in her stomach, the hunger that’s so deep it feels as though it has settled into her bones. she’s been so hungry. she found crickets and tried to eat them, and got them halfway down before vomiting up the last of her foraged meal. she hadn’t made that mistake twice. food has been scarcer and scarcer on the edges of the arena where finch likes to hide, and she thinks that is the gamemakers’ way of driving her inward. she is stubborn, though, and doesn’t. finally, the sun comes up, and the feast begins, and she runs out from the cornucopia, grabs her bag and runs, and she spots thresh on the edge of the woods but she does not stop running. 

four is the number of food parcels they have left her in her bag. it will last her a day, maybe two if she rations, but she does not cry, even though she wants to. 

**five.**

five is the number of berries she takes from the district twelve boy’s stash. she doesn’t know what they are; the plant training station had cautioned to never eat berries without seeing the plant they’re from because they’re hard to identify and a mix-up could be fatal, but finch has been watching the twelve tributes for days now. they’re foraging for most of their food, and none of their berries have killed them yet, so she thinks they know what they’re doing. 

five berries won’t sustain her much, but they’re enough. finch knows there are only five tributes left, and she just needs enough time. she needs more time. 

she’s lying to herself when she says she doesn’t know what the berries are. why would she only take five if she thought they were edible? how would that help her? she laughs a little, to herself, a dry and bitter laugh. does she even want to win? 

she knows ( _oh, god, how she knows_ ) the prize of the hunger games is your life, but. but finch isn’t stupid. if there is one thing she has never been, she has never been _stupid_. she’s seen the looks in the eyes of glimmer’s mentor backstage at the interviews, the tall blonde woman who laughs like she has nothing to lose but the moment someone looks away, she crumples, like a discarded paper doll, and of finnick, that one time he came to watch his tribute training (she could tell he thought she’d get far. she laughs again — if only he’d known she’d die on day five. laughably low for a career, this she knows), and even of her own mentor, a woman (more of a girl, really — jules was only bordering on age twenty-one. she’d won only six years ago by making allies and killing them off in their sleep; pretending mutts did it and seeking help from other tributes) and she saw the look in jules’ eyes when capital men came up to her backstage at the interviews. like the squirrel she’d seen that had electrocuted itself on the power plant’s electric fence. finch doesn’t want to live like that. 

she knows people will think what she’s done is an ignorant, stupid mistake; that she’d stolen the wrong berries. they’re wrong. she knows exactly what she is doing. it is not an ignorant, stupid mistake. it is only two of those three things. she closes her eyes, and counts to five. 

she puts the berries in her mouth. they’re sweet, almost sickeningly so, and she can feel the juice on her lips. she can feel her pulse begin to race. she counts it, and when it begins to slow, she stops. she realizes she can no longer feel the grass on her skin, and her mind feels slower; it doesn’t move as fast as it used to, and she doesn’t want to think about what that means (even though she knows exactly what it means, she wanted this to happen, and there’s a sudden rush of panic and her heartbeat does not jump as she thinks _oh god i’ve made a terrible mistake_ ) and so she starts counting her heartbeat again. 

_one._

_two._

_three._

_four._

_five._


End file.
